Three Hours Later

After writing the previous post, I read all of my previous posts on the page. This is something that I have not done before. Many of the same concerns arise again and again. Two things:

1) These posts are clearly biased toward the more melancholy moments of the past few months. I often notice that I almost never write when I am content and feeling overall elation. Writing, usually, is a means of emotional problem solving, but only when I feel there is a problem. Certainly, there are many forms of content that hide the problems, even from one’s self. And these are problems that, even while knowing they are there, I do not feel compelled to deal with. 

2) Reading the posts actually did a fair amount to reshape the terrain of my mind, to use the language I did in the last post. The flow of my thoughts moved according to how it ought to when I am doing philosophy; the dormant ‘lights’ of my mind lit up again, and the structure of my first lecture arose mostly spontaneously with little effort, and with solid satisfaction. Some reflection was needed afterward, but only to provide modifications, not restructuring. 

After that last post, I crawled back into bed and slept for about two hours. I dreamed of today’s lecture, and I know that even in my sleeping state I was thinking through the lecture, figuring it out. Dreaming about philosophy is not something that happens to me often anymore, although when I was an undergraduate, it happened all of the time. I believe, although I cannot be sure, that moments like this edify my mind around the forms of whatever philosophy I am dealing with on that day.